By way of explaining my lack of blogs of late, I tend to take a blog sabbatical this time of year and pick up sometime in January. But I do have a tradition of compiling a list of blogs you may have missed during the year. Not including reviews which garner a good chunk of traffic (such as Legend of the Guardian, Inception, Wolverine and the X-Men, and House M.D. (Part I and Part II)), here are either my favorites or the ones which get the most traffic:
Shame On Us – weirdly enough, other than a few review blogs, this was the most read and most landed on blog of mine.
Road to Mo*Con VI – my single highest read blog. And I was just announcing one of the topics of conversation for next year’s Mo*Con.
After a stint of vagabond spirituality, sermon exhaustion, and church shopping (part I and part II), the Broaddus family settled on a new church home. Right out the box I wrote Our Church Stinks and My Pastor Irritates the Crap Out of Me (which the church leadership absolutely loved).
Why do you people still need all that Black Stuff – I try to avoid getting sucked into discussions going on on the internet, but sometimes I just can’t resist commenting.
PC Challenges of being an Editor – it’s really not that hard to have an inclusive, diverse looking Table of Contents when putting together an anthology.
The Artist and the Church – finding our way as artists with our love/hate relationship with (and from) the church.
What would Republican Jesus Do – this is me not wading into political discussions…
On the writing career front, we have The 40 Year Old Virgin (Writer), The Crossroads, and A Time for Career Selfishness.
There were a few blogs on poverty, which has inspired a project I’m working on: A Day of Day Street with Outreach Inc (part I and part II), This is not a Soup Kitchen, Helping the Homeless, and Poor People are Not Grateful.
The Seduction and Toxicity of Victimhood. AND The Private Lives of Writers and the Blurred Lines of Ministry.
Hey. Unrelated subject: I just wanted to know if you’d seen/taken the kids/reviewed/thought of reviewing the latest Narnia movie, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. (Always one of my favorite children’s/Narnia tales; and you should know that strangely enough, (I’ve told you) I’m a big Lewis fan; still; we pagans never break our old friendships or bonds! I know lots about CSL.)
So: have you seen it/wanted to see it – what was your response? Seems to have done quite well though many Christians were nervous. There were a lot of misgivings when it first came out, a week or two before Christmas. They appear to have changed the plot with substantial additions of sinister world-destroying green mist, human sacrifices and a WoW/compute game collect the mystic swords plot. But the essentials that I always loved like Reepicheep and Eustace turning into a dragon are still in.
I can’t see it at the cinema – the new one where I’m at (finally) opens only at Easter! So what was it like: and did you/will you take the kids?
i’ve actually already seen it (kids weren’t allowed at the sneak preview though my boys want to see it), but never got around to posting a review of it.
(I read the reviews of it on hollywoodjesus and yours wasn’t among them.)
Hey I remember that shame post: so it got a lot of hits? (How do you tell? You don’t use a hit counter: stats analysis site?)
Shame: Yes I forgot to say that some experts analyse old-time pagan cultures as having a “shame culture” (to do with status in the tribe and what the Chinese – and British – call “saving face”.) Whereas Christians are meant to have a “guilt culture” – aren’t they? But I think I can see that lots of Christians are obsessed with status and saving face as well!
Oh right! Just saw your answer. Well – did you like it? Surely it merited posting a review *sometime*? I’ll have to wait till the DVD. Please tell me one thing – was the Eustace dragon well done? (And did Reepicheep chase Eustace round the deck smacking his arse with the rapier previously – because obnoxious Eustace had tried to swingthim by his tail?? I always loved and laughed over that scene!)
yeah, i’ll probably post the review sometime this week
So you’ve near-written it?? Will it be cross-posted to HJ too??
Like I said: I can’t bear to wait till the spring to find out: you’ll have to tell me what I want to know either by review or by email!
Yes: anyone who doesn’t dig that Reepicheep(he’s a 3-foot-tall mouse chevalier, for peeps who don’t know!)-on-Eustace arse-smacking scene doesn’t have a true British sense of humour. (You *do* want one, don’t you?!)
But the most important thing is that the Eustace-to-dragon thing works totally – special-effects-wise, as a cautionary tale, and most of all, *affect*-wise. Lewis makes it a very harrowing tale for a youngster to read! I was about 7 when I devoured the entire Chronicles of Narnia! Advanced reader. Pauline Baynes illustrations too were unforgettable. Are the books in the boys’ library yet?
Take the kids to this one! (But don’t tell them in advance what happens to Eustace. If it’s done right, it’ll blow their minds!)
Did you read them any of the Narnia stories previously – bedtime reads! They *must* have viewed the LWW movie and possibly Prince Caspian.. (Why did they make the threatened prince into an older teenager, with like a Serbian/Slavic accent? Not that I don’t want to see Slavs in fiction: but I wasn’t aware that the Telmarines were.. (Still: Lewis said that they were basically pirate intruders from our world who centuries before fell into that one: maybe they were Rus: maybe there is some method to these H-wood vagaries..) But I always envisaged him as a little boy with an impeccable British accent!)
yeah, we just did LWW as our family night night movie and they just got prince caspian (though i hear that wasn’t as good). but we just got through going through all of the harry potter series and i’m trying to get them on LOTR.